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Spencer Wells is a population geneticist. His book covers much the same ground as Stephen Oppenheimer's Out of Eden; both books contain a fair amount of detail but are aimed at non-specialists. They describe what has been discovered about how humans spread across the world after they left Africa some 50,000 years ago. Until quite recently our knowledge of human migrations relied mostly on archaeology. We now have the equally important contribution provided by population genetics.

Researchers have two main lines of attack in their quest to study the history of migration. Mitochondrial DNA is inherited from the mother and so tells us about the female side; the Y chromosome, which determines male sex and is inherited from the father, gives us information about male ancestry. Historically, mitochondrial analysis was first on the scene, leading to the announcement of 'Mitochondrial Eve' in 1987. She was thought to have lived in Africa about 200,000 years ago; we are all her descendants, although this does not mean that she was the only woman living at that time; it's just that the others have no surviving descendants. [More]